Mental health program

How long a Los Angeles County resident lives can depend on where they live in the area, and the gap between the county’s richest and poorest communities has gotten wider over the past decade, according to a report released this week.

Average life expectancy countywide is 80.5 years, according to the report by Measure of America, a program of the Social Science Research Council. That’s down 1.6 years from the group’s previous report, released in 2017.

The Portrait of Los Angeles County measures how Angelenos are doing neighborhood by neighborhood, using a metric called the Human Development Index, or HDI. The index combines life expectancy, educational attainment and personal earnings into a single well-being score between 0 and 10.

The county’s HDI crept up to 5.64, from 5.43 in the previous report. That was far short of a county goal set in 2017 to raise L.A. County’s HDI by a full point.

“The main reason for this anemic progress is COVID and the disproportionate impacts it had on different groups of Angelenos,” said Kristen Lewis, director of Measure of America.

Drug overdoses and cardiovascular disease also contributed, the report says.

The report was produced in partnership with the L.A. County Department of Mental Health and supported by a group of philanthropic funders including the James Irvine Foundation, Cedars-Sinai and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.

A widening gap

The report details disparities between L.A. County’s wealthiest communities — where life expectancy went up — and poorer ones, where it dropped.

“What we saw in terms of change over time is that the areas that were already doing well are doing better,” Lewis said.

The gap between the longest-living and shortest-living communities is more than 16 years. Average life expectancy in Westwood was 88.1, compared to 71.8 in the Antelope Valley community of Sun Village.

Lewis said she drove to Sun Village during the research process and found no grocery stores and no sidewalks.

“It would be very hard to make healthy choices in that environment,” she said.

While median personal earnings rose countywide since the last report, they didn’t keep pace with dramatically rising housing costs.

In every L.A. County neighborhood, a resident earning the local median salary would need to work more than 40 hours a week to afford median housing costs, according to the report. In 31 L.A. County neighborhoods, that figure exceeds 80 hours.

The report sorts L.A. County neighborhoods into five tiers of well-being, based on where they fall on the Human Development Index, from “precarious L.A.” to “glittering L.A.”

No community in the county scored below 3.0 on the HDI and landed in the lowest tier in the 2026 report. That’s an improvement from 2017, when six areas fell into that category, including Cudahy, Westmont and Southeast Los Angeles.

The latest report examined L.A. County death records between 2019 and 2023. The earlier report had looked at 2010 through 2014.

One bright spot, according to researchers, was that educational attainment improved significantly. The share of adults with a bachelor’s degree rose by more than 18%.

Measure of America’s breakdown of the ‘5 L.A.s’, rated via the Human Development Index, or HDI.

Disparities abound

Latinos saw the steepest decline in life expectancy of any major racial group, falling 3.7 years to 80.7 years of age.

The report attributes this largely to COVID-19, noting that Latino Angelenos are disproportionately concentrated in frontline jobs and are more likely to live in overcrowded, multigenerational households, both factors that increased exposure to the virus.

Asian Angelenos have the longest life expectancy, at 86.2 years. Black Angelenos live to 72.9, on average, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders to just 71.2.

Black mothers remain nearly four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white or Asian women.

Lewis said the disparities across neighborhoods are based on policy choices.

“There’s nothing natural or inevitable about inequality,” Lewis said. “It was really decades of deliberate decisions, policies and investments designed to advantage some groups of Angelenos while excluding others that really created this landscape of inequality we see today.

Measure of America rankings of the top and bottom L.A. County neighborhoods by Human Developent Index score.

What comes next

Lewis said she hopes local officials and community organizations use the report to guide planning, programming and investment decisions.

After the first report in 2017, the city of Los Angeles relocated some workforce development sites based on neighborhood HDI scores, and the county Department of Mental Health used the findings for needs assessment, according to the report.

Kalene Gilbert, a coordinator at the L.A. County Department of Mental Health, said the department used the 2017 report to decide where to pilot community school programs, targeting areas with the worst education disparities.

“If we’re really serious about equity in L.A. County, it’s reports like this that really help make that a reality because this provides that understanding of where the need is at a really detailed level,” Gilbert said.

The report’s underlying data end in 2023, before several major crises hit L.A. County.

The January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed thousands of homes and displaced tens of thousands of people.

Federal immigration enforcement raids that summer disrupted daily life in immigrant communities, leading the Board of Supervisors to declare a state of emergency in October.

The passage of the federal budget bill in July 2025 cut $750 million in annual funding for the county’s public health system, according to the report.

None of that is reflected in the latest HDI scores.

Gilbert said those crises are already affecting the people DMH serves. She said immigration raids have made some clients afraid to leave their homes for appointments, forcing the department to shift toward telehealth.

“We consistently hear concern about just even coming out into the community,” Gilbert said.The report’s interactive portal, where residents can explore data for their neighborhoods, is available at Measure of America’s website.